FAYETTEVILLE — City Council members resumed discussion of a potential change to Fayetteville’s policy for selling municipally owned property Wednesday.
A revised ordinance, first proposed by City Attorney Kit Williams late last year, would remove the city’s requirements for obtaining two independent appraisals, seeking competitive bids and advertising at least four times in a local newspaper before selling city-owned land.
Adjacent property owners would still have to be notified by certified mail of an upcoming sale, and a sign would still have to be prominently displayed on a property that is to be sold.
“This is untying some of the knots the City Council has tied around their hands to allow them to sell property,” Williams said before the council’s Ordinance Review Committee meeting Wednesday.
Aldermen have made multiple exemptions to the ordinance since it was enacted in 2002 amid complaints from residents living near the Barrington Parke subdivision. Residents there said they had not been adequately notified by former Mayor Dan Coody’s administration about plans to sell 13 acres of undeveloped land along Mission Boulevard to a private buyer.
Exemptions during the past decade have been made for sales of industrial park land, such as the Wilson Springs property in northwest Fayetteville, sales to other cities or the Arkansas State Highway Commission and sales that are part of a redevelopment district, like the tax increment financing district in downtown Fayetteville that paid to demolish the former Mountain Inn hotel.
Wednesday’s discussion was prompted in part by city staff’s desire for another exemption to the ordinance.
Chris Brown, city engineer, said complying with current city code would add time and cost to planned widening of Arkansas 16 between Armstrong Avenue and Stonebridge Road. Arkansas 16 is also known as 15th Street and Huntsville Road within city limits.
Brown said it would cost more to appraise a 10- to 15-foot-wide utility easement that’s going to be sold to SourceGas than the land is worth. He estimated the easement’s value at less than $1,000.
In other cases, it would have taken city officials about three months to comply with current code, Williams said.
Williams could only recall one example in the past 10 years where the full ordinance actually applied. In that case, which involved the sale of city land at an intersection near Ramay Junior High School, only one party bid the project, Williams said, and that bid came from the buyer city officials had originally expected at the minimum price set for the sale by the council.
He said, instead of watering down the ordinance with further exemptions or going through the rigmarole of multiple appraisals, sealed bids and newspaper ads, aldermen should trust themselves to make an educated decision about whether to sell city land at a certain price.
Any wholesale change to existing policy is likely to draw criticism from those who fought to put it in place.
When aldermen last discussed Williams’ proposal at a Dec. 6 council meeting, Washington County resident Fran Alexander and Cyrus Young, the former Fayetteville alderman who sponsored the ordinance, urged council members to keep their current policy in place as a way of encouraging public understanding and input.
Aldermen decided at that time to move forward with the sale of two construction easements north of Albright Road to the city of Springdale to expedite Crossover Road work. But they opted against making more sweeping changes to the ordinance.
Justin Tennant, Ward 3 alderman, and Sarah Lewis, Ward 4 alderwoman, emphasized on Wednesday doing away with the requirement for independent appraisals wouldn’t mean the council wouldn’t still exercise its option of having a property appraised before it is sold.
Like Tennant and Lewis, Brenda Boudreaux, a Ward 1 alderwoman, voted in favor of forwarding the revised ordinance to the full City Council with a recommendation for approval. She said she wanted to make sure the ordinance’s notification rules were in line with other city policies before officially approving it.
According to Chapter 157 of Fayetteville Unified Development Code, public notice of upcoming hearings for development applications, conditional use permits and zoning variances and appeals must be given 15 days in advance in the form of a written letter to adjacent property owners and a sign posted on the subject property.
Public hearings for annexations, planned zoning districts and vacations of public rights of way and easements also require advance notice published “in a newspaper of general circulation of the city.”
Williams said he expected the issue to appear on the council’s April 17 agenda.